


like a comet pulled from orbit

by johnny-and-dora (sian_jpg)



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Fluff, I'll Explain Later, Love Confessions, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, this is a one shot for now but i'd definitely be open to writing more in this universe!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 22:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18537166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sian_jpg/pseuds/johnny-and-dora
Summary: "She files the memory away in the new mental folder she’s been curating since last night, affectionately labelled ‘HUGE, RIDICULOUSLY OBVIOUS CLUES THAT JAKE IS YOUR SOULMATE’, and shifts her attention back to him."or, a soulmate au where jake's known for his whole life & amy's known since yesterday, with two grand heartfelt speeches for good measure.





	like a comet pulled from orbit

**Author's Note:**

> so here's what you need to know: this one-shot takes place in a universe where your soulmates name is written somewhere on you in their handwriting, except jake's handwriting is so goddamn unreadable that amy manages to make it all the way to five years at the nine-nine without realising that her soulmate has been sat across from her this entire time. shenanigans ensue.
> 
> i'm not good with fully-fledged, multi-chapter fics, but i have had the most fun ever writing this lil one-shot over the last two weeks, so i hope you enjoy this and i might post some more set in the same universe in the future! <3

“I had this great big plan, y’know.” He says, deliberately averting her gaze – Amy furrows her brow, adjusting her slumped over position on his old, beat up couch, discards the cushion she’s been hugging to her stomach as some kind of makeshift anchor.

The maelstrom of confusion, anger and pure, unadulterated anxiety that has been rearing its ugly head deep in her gut since yesterday has quietly subsided in the intimate setting of his crappy, cozy, lowly lit Cobblestank apartment – she supposes that’s why she’s here, seeing as she wasn’t able to come up with a valid reason on the drive over, or even in the ten minutes she spent standing outside his door, poised ready to knock.

If there’s anyone who always knows exactly how to calm her down, it’s frustratingly, somehow, him.

_(“Detective’s intuition, Santiago.” He’d winked, a lifetime ago when she’d once asked - handed her coffee after making her laugh for the first time in about three days, and she’d pretended to be impressed by his use of the word ‘intuition’.)_

She files the memory away in the new mental folder she’s been curating since last night, affectionately labelled ‘HUGE, RIDICULOUSLY OBVIOUS CLUES THAT JAKE IS YOUR SOULMATE’, and shifts her attention back to him.

“What?”

“For telling you. I’d, um, been working on it for a while.” Jake’s hands are clenched and his leg is jostling up and down at a hundred miles an hour when it clicks, and she feels her heart skip a beat.

In truth, he doesn’t need to say anything – he’s apologised probably at least twenty times in the past day, most of them in the eight minutes that have passed since she arrived unannounced, unexpected really to the both of them, at his door. God knows he’s probably forgiven already if her heart has any say in the matter, even if she’s reluctant to tell him that.

But here he suddenly is, practically ablaze with all this brilliant, blinding energy, willing to put his heart out on the line for her – and Amy feels any semblance of protest quickly die in her throat.

 “Yeah?” She prompts, gentle enough for it to be vaguely unfamiliar territory compared to their usual rapport. Her hand ghosts over his like an unspoken question before their fingers, almost by design, interweave.

It’s not intimate, exactly, barely even romantic - but he squeezes gently, once, twice, and something in the air shifts.

“I…I was gonna take you to the roof. Our roof, I mean, the roof.” He braves a fleeting glance at her and she tilts her head up to firmly hold it – there’s trepidation and question reflected in his eyes, but there’s also such _reverence_ there, something so powerful that Amy can scarcely remember how to breathe.

The corner of his mouth immediately twitches upwards at the flush of her face, like he knows _exactly_ what he’s doing to her, and she fights the urge to roll her eyes.

“…I was going to give this grand heartfelt speech where I basically confess my undying love for you, and tell you that we’re soulmates, and then beg you to not kill me for not telling you sooner. And then you were, er, going to forgive me and we would kiss and then ride off into the sunset.” He’s smiling fully now, all the radiance of the goddamn sun as per usual, and she can’t help but tease him.

“Ride off into the sunset?”

“Yeah, like the end of every old romantic movie ever.” He makes a sweeping, dismissive gesture with his free hand. “And everything was gonna be, y’know. Okay.” His voice falters, trips up a bit on the last word – his hand slips out of hers as they’re reminded of the mess – okay, _shitstorm_ , that they’ve found themselves entangled up in.

Anxiety churns in her stomach as she agonises over how she’s supposed to feel – it was anger yesterday, but that feels wrong here. There’s just confusion and uncertainty and yes, desire, achingly inevitable desire; she has no idea what to act upon, no how-to-guide, no forum thread for _“so your best friend has been secretly your soulmate this whole time.”_ (She checked). Amy has no idea what to do.

All because of the stupid universe and it’s stupid cosmic matchmaking - something she didn’t even know if she believed in until a few hours ago, something she’s been decidedly against for almost three decades.

All she is certain of now is that whatever choice lead her here, whatever lead her to him, is the one and only decision she’s allowing the universe to make for her.

(Despite whatever thread of fate they both followed to end up here, Amy maintains that what she says next - and the perfectly ordinary miracle that happens after - happens completely of her own volition.)

“Do the speech.”

“Uh, what?”

“I want to hear it. This grand heartfelt speech.” She says, taking far too much enjoyment out of the sheer panic that instantly flashes across his face.

“Uh, well, it was more of an abstract concept. And I haven’t actually practised anywhere other than the shower, and a lot of it was tied in to the whole roof thing so I don’t actually know if it’ll work here-“

“Do the speech, Peralta.”

“Okay. Okay. Here we go.” He holds a hand up in mock surrender, takes a deep breath, lets his fingers drum absentmindedly on the arm of the couch before he shifts his position to face her.

She crosses her arms expectantly, trying to subdue her smile or at least dial it down a few notches so she doesn’t give away just how hopelessly into him she really is.

“Amy. Santiago. Amy Santiago. The woman I am speaking to, right now.”

“Stop stalling.”

“Okay. So, you’re probably wondering why I brought you to this random rooftop in the middle of Brooklyn.” He grins like the little shit he is, and she resolves with ironclad determination not to let him get away that easily. “And this is where you say ‘Yes, I am, Jake, and I must say how handsome you look today.’”

“This is not a call and response thing.” Amy says, in the authoritative tone she reserves for him – he gives her a playful salute in response. It’s standard practise, familiar, and for a moment she wonders if that’s all she’s ever going to get.

“Noted. And I would say “’Thank you Amy, but this isn’t about me. It’s actually about us.’” His grin falters a little, now - she unfolds her arms, allowing him the time and space to say what he needs to, gently encouraging him to continue.

“I really like you. Like, really _really_ like you. Like, I’m obsessed with how shiny your hair is and the way you scrunch up your nose when you’re annoyed and the way your eyes get all big and excited whenever you figure something out. You’re brilliant and beautiful and I’ve basically spent the last five years we’ve known each other trying to work up the courage to tell you that.”

He’s rambling at a pace she’s spent the last few years tripping over herself trying to catch up to - but she drinks every single word in anyway, like she’s scrambling for an oasis in the empty, unforgiving sands of a desert. This is new; Amy can feel her resolve practically melting away, like he’s stripping down every last layer of her defences.

Like Monopoly and getting more felony arrests than her, he’s irritatingly good at it.

“And this is where I would ask you out, except you would probably say no, not because you’re not hopelessly in love with me – but because we’re not cosmically bound together or whatever.” He swallows thickly, clearly nervous, and she inches closer to him with protective instinct, hand finding its way to the small of his back.

“And I would say yeah, that’s fair, except maybe actually it might be my unintelligible handwriting that you have scrawled on your ribcage, and that I’m _really_ sorry about all the inconvenience that has caused you.”

“And then I would say…Amy, we are soulmates. And I’ve known that for a really long time, and I’m a huge gigantic idiot for not telling you sooner. I was just…scared. By the time I realised that you just couldn’t tell it was me, you were already yelling at me for spilling orange soda on your arrest report and I just…figured you’d rather not know.”

Her heart fragments and splints a little at that, enough for any remaining anger or notions of  injustice raging in the depths of her gut to be very easily extinguished.

“Jake…”

“Nah, you said it wasn’t a call and response thing, remember?” He tries to say it lightly but the usual humour colouring his voice is notably absent, so he just takes a deep breath and continues, seemingly (how can he be?) unaware of how she is certain that her heart is somehow his.

“Anyway, I was terrified that if you found out you were just going to be…disappointed. And I know it’s not the same, but I just kept thinking about my dad leaving and how I was so scared that you’d leave too, if you knew.”

Amy recalls a stakeout from a year or so ago, an impassioned exchange of _fuck you, universe_ between sips of coffee because _she’s powerless to find hers_ and _his dad left anyway_ , so what’s the point, and it makes sense – as much as she wants to strangle him for not telling her then, it makes sense.

“It just got more and more difficult to bring up, y’know? Like, by the way, we’re soulmates, can you pass me that case file?” She nods in understanding, empathy twisting in her chest against her steadily increasing heart rate – when he finally looks at her again, it’s overpowering, like everything in the air is charged, magnified, primed ready to explode.

“The thing is, I’m…I’m _really_ into you.” He pauses, allowing the tiniest, almost _shy_ smile to cross his face, and pure, unadulterated affection flutters in her chest. “And I would really love it if we could…y’know. But you needed to know this first – actually, I guess, you needed to know this a long time ago.” He rubs the back of his neck sheepishly, shame flickering in his features.

“I guess I just want you to know that I’m really, genuinely sorry. And I know you don’t know how to feel about soulmates, and I get it if you don’t feel the same about me but…I think we could have something really amazing. The end.”

There’s a beat or two of horrible, horrible silence before she remembers that she’s meant to say something back - in her defence, it was a very good speech.

“…You didn’t beg me not to kill you.” She teases lightly, but lets her face soften when she clocks his questioning gaze and realises he needs more, of course, infinitely more. “That was…very nice.”

Nice couldn’t even begin to do it justice, but in the moment she doesn’t have the words to convey how much it means, suddenly shy, suddenly woefully unprepared in the face of such unexpected openness and vulnerability. He’s never going to stop surprising her.

“…Would it have worked?”

“I think…at first, I would have been pretty mad at you. Like I think choosing the roof was a risk, if a very sweet gesture, because I might’ve thrown you off it.” His face crumples a little and she winces, not meaning to cause him any more emotional turmoil than she apparently unknowingly has for the last four years.

 Really, when she visualises the scene, she has no idea how she would actually react – all she knows is now, the feeling of a spark lighting inside her and also vaguely the feeling of her insides turning upside down. She fights the urge to ask for fifteen minutes with her laptop so she can at least outline all she wants to say.

“But…I would also know that you meant it. That you meant all of it, and that you didn’t mean for this all to become the huge gigantic mess that it is.” She gestures widely and openly to signify the huge gigantic mess, and his eyebrows quirk up with endearment.

“So I would forgive you.” She says it with certainty she didn’t know she had until she tripped over it on her tongue – it hangs in the air, somehow unfinished, and she feels a smile blossom over her face as she brushes her shoulder up against his; she holds his gaze for a second before continuing.

“…And then I would probably kiss you.” Amy tries to say it with some boldness, at least – she counts at least fifty different emotions flicker across his face at once before they form an almost smug grin, which makes her laugh enough to almost distract her from the swarm of butterflies currently occupying her stomach.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Probably. If you weren’t dangling from the roof at this point.” She grins and he laughs a little, shaking his head, and then-

And then, silence. Tantalising, breathless silence, silence that’s impossibly alive with endless, infinite potential, brooding like a thunderstorm. When she’s brave enough to look at him he’s staring at her with such heat it feels like she might spontaneously combust, right here in his living room. She bites her lip, barely aware of anything other than blood faintly pumping in her ears.

“Amy?”

“Mmm?”

“Can we…can we stop talking in hypotheticals for a second and can I say that I’m sorry and can you forgive me and then maybe can we kiss?” They’re so close now, intimate enough that she can almost feel the hitch in his breath as he nervously poses the question.

“I’ll think about it.” She’s using the last of her bravado, the very last dredges of her willpower not to lean over and kiss him – except his eyes keep darting down to her lips and she can practically feel her skin bristling, practically incandescent with white-hot desire as she tucks her hair behind her ears and they’ve suffered enough, haven’t they?

So when he leans to tentatively a kiss to her lips she instantly deepens it, overwhelmed by the intense, rapid rhythms of her pulse at his touch, at his hands sweeping down her spine and hers in his hair and _wow._ It’s fervent and almost desperate at first but soon slows to tenderness as they both seem to realise that they have all the time in the world.

She feels him smile against her lips in the moment before they break apart and she _dares_ him to ruin the moment with a ridiculous joke, but all he does is expel a sigh of relief , like a man deprived of oxygen for months. She knows the feeling.

“Wow.” She murmurs, lightheaded, forehead pressed against his, eyes still closed. When they finally flutter open to meet with his it’s frustratingly clear that they were _made_ to do this; the part of her that’s been resolutely against the universe pairing people together for the best part of thirty years is disgruntled to be proved wrong so swiftly and effortlessly.

But mostly, she’s happy. The way that Jake looks at her makes her feel treasured and desired and revered in a way that no-one else ever has, and she is so ridiculously, unbelievably, deliriously happy.

“You. You are just…you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” It’s barely a whisper but it sets her _alight_ – he’s breathless, tone dripping with pure, unbridled sincerity, and it’s enough.

 He’s forgiven, because of course he is – really, he was forgiven long before she stepped past the threshold of his apartment, but she’s not going to be the one to tell him that if he’s going to kiss her like _that_ and say lines like _that_ afterwards.

She wants to say something, anything moderately affirming or even just coherent back, but for the first time in a very long time, Amy Santiago is rendered completely and utterly speechless.

So instead, she just kisses him again.

***

She gets around to telling him later, when the initial rush of adrenaline has faded into quiet embers of content joy and she can finally string a semi-coherent sentence together. Amy can’t really tell how much time has passed since, only that it is later, later, later, that moonlight is spilling through the gap in his curtains in the same way that dusty orange twilight was when she first arrived here, and yet she has absolutely no desire to leave.

Her soft grey linen hoodie lies on the arm of the couch and his left sock is discarded on the floor from when she’d traced her name etched in perfect, neat cursive just above his ankle and he’d quipped some line about finally being able to wear flip flops to work again without fear of discovery.

They’ve been talking, mostly, laughing in a way that is warmly familiar, even if the way their hands are intertwined isn’t – she has this wonderful feeling that it will be, in time.

“You really don’t mind that I didn’t tell you?” Jake has asked her some variant of this question roughly every ten minutes, seemingly struck by disbelief that he isn’t dangling from a roof at this very moment – it’s only now, though, that she realises she has the right to some grand speech of her own, even if she’s mildly disappointed that she can’t practise first.

Some things just can’t be planned, much to her horror – but to be fair, she never could have planned any of this, and she thinks it’s reasonable to say that it ended up all working out.  

“Well, I’m not…happy about it. Part of me definitely wishes that you’d just told me, because I absolutely had the right to know after decades of torturing myself over it.” She gives him a pointed stare that lasts almost a second before her resolve completely dissipates at his puppy-dog gaze.

“But the rest of me is actually glad I didn’t know.” His eyebrows shoot up in almost comic confusion, and she laughs lightly, joy practically bubbling in her chest. She puts a hand over his heart and takes the time to choose her next words carefully, delicately, in a way that she hopes will tell him that she really means them.

“Well, the way I see it….this way I get to choose you. This way, I get to be with you because you’re brilliant, and sweet, and you make me laugh. Not just because your name is written in appallingly bad handwriting on my ribcage.”

“Huh. I guess I never really thought about it like that.” He goes somewhere else for a second; there’s that thoughtful far-away look where she can practically see seventeen different trains of thought pinging off his brain like a cell tower. When he focuses back on her it’s with unbridled affection as if he’s only just realising all the nice things she said about him, and she smiles.

“Yeah, well…I’ve been thinking about this a lot, lately. And I guess…I choose you. Not because I feel like I should, or because the universe tells me I’m supposed to. Because I want to. Because I know that you’re the right person for me.” Amy’s not sure she’s ever said anything with more conviction in her life  – the momentum behind her words absolutely terrifies her, but it’s thrilling too, feeling this much for one person all at once.

He’s quiet, for once – by the low light of his cheap lamp, she might even be able to make out the ghost of blush lightly colouring his face, and she thinks, _point to Santiago._ Not that she’s keeping score. (They’re even.)

“Only you would find a way to argue for free will even after all this. You are unbelievable.” The last word is said in a tone of complete and utter awe and admiration that it sweeps her off her feet – she reaches out to cup his face and press a long, drawn-out lazy kiss to his lips that feels so natural it’s like they’ve been doing this for years. He starts to press kisses that trace down her neck and collarbone, easily shifting her entire world on its axis; it’s dizzying.

Amy’s so, unbelievably glad that if she was going to fall for anyone, it had to be her soulmate – and yet, she somehow feels sure that that this was always going to happen anyway, regardless of whatever name she had inked on her skin.

In this life and any other, she was always going to choose him.

“I choose you too, by the way.” He mumbles, a little breathless, looking up at her like she’s the only thing that matters. “I just thought that was implied.”

She says a begrudging, silent thank you to the universe – in the moonlit sky pouring through the crack in the curtains, the stars catch a glimpse of them and smile.

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to erica (@startofamoment) for reading this over for me, for being so lovely about my first au and for listening to me ramble about it on and off for like a month. also shout out to johanna (@amyscascadingtabs) for being so sweet and enthusiastic, both about this fic and in general! finally, thank you to em (@elsaclack) because her most recent soulmate au heavily inspired this one and also because i basically worship everything she writes
> 
> oh and most importantly, thank you for reading!!!!! you can yell at me about b99 or just anything really over on tumblr @johnny-and-dora <33333


End file.
